Does anyone else remember weirdly watching The OC to see The Revenge of the Sith trailer?

Pardon me for being a little late to The Revenge of the Sith celebration as the Star Wars movie turns 20 in 2025, but I recently remembered something about the movie that I just couldn’t keep to myself.

With the news that the Wicked: For Good trailer was going to be shown for the first time to general audiences as part of a special re-release of Wicked in North American movie theaters on Wednesday, June 4, I remembered how highly anticipated movies used to do similar things like this all the time.

There was the fact that The Phantom Menace trailer was included as a preview for the Brad Pitt movie Meet Joe Black. I also remember special clips of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone being previewed on The WB (what eventually became The CW). But the strangest that I can recall is the first trailer for The Revenge of the Sith being paired with an episode of Fox’s teen soap drama, The OC.

If you need a reminder, The OC starred Ben McKenzie, Mischa Barton, Adam Brody, Rachel Bilson, Kelly Rowan and Peter Gallagher. It centered on a troubled teen (McKenzie) who is taken in by a public defender (Gallagher) and his family, and becomes embroiled in the lives of the wealthy high schoolers of Orange County, Calif.

The OC was in its second season in the spring of 2025 when it was reported that The Revenge of the Sith trailer world premiere would be during an airing of The OC. I was not a viewer of The OC at the time — the most I’ve ever seen of the show is the SNL skit “Dear Sister” that parodies a big moment from the show’s run — but as a teenager that was a massive Star Wars fan, there was no way I was going to miss the trailer’s debut.

Of course, it was never made clear what time the trailer was going to premiere to try to have Star Wars fans like me watch the entire episode of The OC to make sure they didn’t miss it. In hindsight I should have known they would wait until the end of the episode to show the trailer, but I was an excited kid, so that kind of logical reasoning wasn’t factoring into my decision.

However, there was thankfully a bit of TV technology that allowed me to monitor when the trailer was going to be shown without having to sit through The OC — Picture-in-Picture. For the Gen Zers and younger of the world, this was basically our equivalent of a second screen in 2005. You could set up your TV so that the majority of the screen was on one channel, while a smaller box in the corner was on another.

So that’s what I did. I don’t remember what I watched instead, but my eye was always on the Picture-in-Picture box to see when The OC was going to commercial and then quickly flipping over to see if that break would be the one where The Revenge of the Sith trailer premiered.

At long last it was time, the trailer was shown, which I remember as three blissful moments that had to keep me satisfied for two months until the movie was released in May (YouTube, which launched in February 2005, was still in its infancy at the time and not the place to watch a movie trailer as much as you want that it is now).

Watch the full trailer and intro from The OC’s Brody right here:

We get this kind of thing from time to time nowadays with anticipated movie trailers often being shown during major sporting events or special live stream events where they force people to wait online for an hour or so to see the trailer. But almost immediately after it premieres it’s going to be online to watch, so it’s not necessary you tune in.

It’s expected to be the same with Wicked: For Good; those in the theater are likely only getting about a five to 10 minute head start on the rest of us (though you are getting to see a great movie again on the big screen, so there is a bonus to it).

I don’t think we could ever recreate the same experience of The Revenge of the Sith trailer being paired with The OC, but looking back on it I kind of loved it.